Creative musings in bright colors

Posts tagged ‘green’

I’ve just seen so many people doing complicated double accent nails, and I wanted to try it! Also I love this purple.

I feel like I cheated with this because the complicated nails are just water decals. This whole mani took under an hour, and as usual, most of that was waiting for the polish to dry! Unfortunately, the decal nails did need a white base (instead of just applying them over a base-coated nail) because the decals are not opaque. They are beautiful regardless!

Super simple and super fast. This is one of the quasi-Christmas themed manicures I actually did over the holiday break. I more or less only took reds and greens with me, with a few stamping plates. I decided to do a tone-on-tone manicure using the wonderful opacity of every A England polish, and one of my favorite (if underused) dark green holos, Ski Lodge.

This whole manicure took less than an hour, and it was mostly waiting for Ski Lodge to dry before I could stamp. The design ended up being somewhat subtle, but since the nails were a vibrant shade of forest green, they were themselves far from subtle!

Dragons scales using Dragon! Because I had to. This also ended up rather chrome-y because I went for a silver metallic base. I kinda like it! The end effect a was a bit like nail foils.

This week is going to be a random mishmash of nail art that doesn’t fit well with anything else. At this point (in real time) I am working towards Valentine’s nail art because I know that I won’t get any edited if I wait for February! So these have nothing to do with really, anything, but they were shiny 🙂

This was INTENDED to be my New Years manicure, but I decided it made more sense to post my Top 10 early and these late! But, they are sparkly, shifty, and weirdly colored (which I think will end up being a theme this week).

I am not sure why I decided that Walrus went well with Chance, but I was fiddling with colors and I ended up here. Orange with green is not my typical go-to but I kinda like how it turned out! I also really like this stamp 😀

One day closer to gift-day (aka Christmas) and one more red/green manicure!

I started with red glitter, then double stamped with a white-to-green and green-to-white gradient (I don’t know why) and when that just looked messy I stamped with dark red. Despite the completely unplanned and frequently ugly nature of this manicure as it developed, I actually quite like the end result!

Yes, it is a pun off the name of the polish, yes I am a goofball! Also, today formally begins the series of holiday-appropriate nail art. This one was painted during autumn but is honestly more red/green than orange/green which was the initial intent!

Anyway, this is a very very simple manicure (as many are during things like residency). Just a polish and a stamp. Now, the polish happens to be a multichrome, and the stamp is a holo. Honestly, I didn’t think this color combo would work that well, but Dragon stamps amazingly well (I just need to acknowledge that A England makes polishes that stamp like magic).

So this mani came out better than expected! I wanted a copperish-green and I almost missed entirely! I started of with a coat of Dragon, which is of course totally opaque in a single coat…and then decided it was too dark! So I topped it with a thin coat of a different green and then STAMPED with Dragon (and some gold). Voila!

I did have to scour a bunch of plates for actual designs though! And with the combo of green and reddish-gold I think it totally works for a quasi-thanksgiving manicure 😀

Luckily, I have part of tomorrow off, so I can at least join my husband and some of our residency friends for dinner, although I am on and overnight call on Friday into Saturday, so I have to hope that whatever awesome nail polish sales happen Friday will be ongoing until Sunday! I also need to apologize for some of the atrocious spelling and grammar at the end of Monday’s post, I should not write blog posts while exhausted. Oops! Hope you enjoyed!

Although I don’t think the photos came out that well, I LOVED wearing this mani! The dark olive green with copper and stamped with copper…and just ugh. It was so shimmery!

I don’t have much else to say about this mani really? It has double stamping, which I remain proud of, and I absolutely love Nerida Singer when I can talk myself into wearing this polish. I still own too many olive green polishes and I refuse to part with any of them!

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed! Friday’s post is a bit less exciting (I don’t like the mani, but I feel compelled to post my failures so others do not repeat them!) so I wanted something pretty in advance!

These are one of my favorite nail designs that I have done recently (…that was not in the 31 Day Challenge, which is where I usually put my favorites). It is a bit of the wrong season, but it was 70 degrees out yesterday so it totally still feels almost-tropical! Basically I love these and I wanted to post them now :-p

These nails are based around water decals from the Born Pretty Store: all the leaves are decals! Which is absolutely amazing because they have white backgrounds and beautiful cut out edges and show up perfectly against a dark green base. I love when I don’t have to use a white base for water decals!!

The flowers I added by hand, because what is a mani with fun leaves without a few dotted petals? I like how colorful it is 🙂 but really I cannot wait to use the rest of these decals, maybe in spring when it is appropriate! But who knows. Snow leaves? I can make that a thing, perhaps!

Hope you enjoyed these tropical nails in the Fall! I think the rest of this month will be a bit more Autumn-themed. I even have some pumpkins! October rather snuck up on me thought, so I only really have one Halloween manicure (which, the holiday is next week, how did that happen)! Hopefully I remember next year in advance and can put together some more fun seasonal manis :-p Anyway, these decals are currently on sale for $1.59 for a set of three sheets, and I strongly recommend them.

This idea got into my head and I just had to run with it! I wanted to make a purple-white-floral overlay, and then add a rectangular stud to make it look like they were being buckled together. Ta-da!

I made nail art using the full nail water decal that you see spread across the tips of my nails here, but honestly I like the way this came out better. Don’t get me wrong, the whole decal is stunning, but there is something about this mani that keeps me coming back to it.

Also the base color here is yet another polish pickup pack shade, this is called Just One Look by Painted Polish, and it is from the August options. This is three thin coats and I adore this polish! It goes on a little thick, but the pastel purple is stunning and I love the linear holo background with the larger holo glitters!

The born pretty store is having a rather impressive sale right now, so you can find this set of decals (with two others) on sale for 99 cents here! Gotta say, I love that these are opaque and yet thin, so if you are into decals I recommend them! Enjoy!

How about some silver triangles on a multichrome glitter base? Don’t mind if I do!

I don’t really know where this manicure came from, just that I wanted to play with Aurora and felt like using a funky triangle stamp. I do love funky geometric stamps! Lets be honest, a lot of stamps are things I could do freehand if I just had enough time. But perfect swirls and perfect geometric lines I could not do without hours! Which is probably why most of my favorite stamps are either straight lines or swirly bits.

That’s it for today! But happy Friday, and I hope you enjoyed the multichrome shininess of Aurora as much as I did! It almost doesn’t matter in this age of a million multichromes, but I had Aurora long before multichrome toppers were much of a thing :-p yes I am a hipster nail polish owner.

The final day of the 31 Day Challenge of 2018 is here! I only participated in about half (a little under half if we’re being honest) of the total and I am still exhausted. Major kudos to all of you who were following along, and to my past self who somehow managed to post daily!

Anyway, today is “honor nails you love” and I have a bit of a different thing happening. Probably 25-30% of all my nail art is based either loosely or exactly on designs I have seen other people do. This time around, I decided to do a design off of the website for a product! Although it is also the nail art used by that product.

What I am trying to say is that today’s post was inspired by, of all things, the stamping plate website itself! I cannot find the original artist (and trust me, I’ve been looking) but I literally bought this plate because this image showed up in my email and I needed to replicate it! So voila. I think I’ve done a pretty good job honestly!

And that’s all for the 31 Day Challenge! Hopefully I will still be around and posting next year, but as residency gets harder we shall see! I am still painting my nails and enjoying it, so I am hopefully. As it turns out, yesterday was my 6 year blogaversary, so I have been blogging for longer than I thought! Go me?

Neon colors are the BEST when I don’t have any interviews! This was inspired by a pinterest pin, but I couldn’t find the original nail artist so you’ll just have to trust me that this is a bit more neon and less pastel, but otherwise close :-p

Two brightly colored manis in one week? Yes please! This the focus of this mani is the stripes I figured it fit well for today. It was painted last Fall (which tells you guys how long I’ve been saving some of these manis).

At some point I need to create a folder of ‘colors that work well together that you’d never guess but should absolutely combine’ because without the inspiration for this mani, I would never have thrown coral with neon green and teal! But it works 🙂

This manicure makes me happy and sad, which is unusual for something as simple as nail art! But looking at these, as much as I hate my nail length, I like how they ended up!

Once they were done, they reminded me of a stone so I went looking for something appropriate on the internet. Apparently, serpentine is a deep green stone with flecks of color and beige-gold veins. Perfect! I wish I could say I was TRYING to make a pretty rock, but I was mostly just having fun with flakies and stamps.

I wasn’t initially going to post these because I broke three nails (omg so sad) and my nails are painfully short and slightly misshapen as a result. However, I liked how the design came out, so I am posting them anyway! Maybe those of you with short nails will find inspiration.

While finishing up my move from the east coast to the midwest, I re-did my nails. After 4 days of packing my nails were a DISASTER, and with only one day left I figured maybe whatever I put on them would survive (at least until unloading)!

I had set aside (aka did not pack) about 10 polishes, 6 cool colors that I thought I might want to wear, and 4 “necessary” polishes: black, white, gold, and silver, all suitable for stamping. For this mani I grabbed one of the two greens I had out, O R’YLEH by Great Lakes Lacquer, and stamped with some gold ginkgo leaves using Good as Gold by Essie!

I had most of my full set of rectangular plates out as well, just because they pack nicely so I figured it would be ok to put them straight into my to-go suitcase. For some reason, these leaves spoke to me! They are from BPX plate L018, which is full of leaves, flowers, and birds.

That’s all for now! The photos look a bit wonky because I had packed away my usual set up, and was basically using my iPhone for all photos (generally my iPhone takes the sunlight/outdoor photos but my 14 year old cannon takes the indirect lighting photos). Oh well!

Sometime, I just want to throw together a bunch of bright colors and play with stamps. The Make Your Mark plate series by Lina makes that REALLY EASY. So here is another mani using it!

I feel like I’ve been using a lot of vampy metallic bases, or pastel ones. Not so much neon. That changes today. Hello neon!

To make this mani, I started with a light green base, then tried to create a gradient over it using greens and teals. But, the teal was too dark! So I switched to a bright blue. After that was dry, I double stamped using two similar designs from the same plate in white then black.

How about something pink and gold? I figure with the flowers it is suitably summer-y too!

The design was inspired by Nails by Erin but my pink base is an AWFUL polish that takes 3 coats and never dries (I need a better barbie pink) and so I wanted to do more things with those nails. I don’t know if this counts as over doing it, but I actually liked it!

Using Erin’s nails as a template got me very excited about gold dots. I love adding dots to things. In this case, added too many gold dots to things…specifically my middle finger. Oops. it would have looked better with more white space 😀

She what I meant by how I have enough flower manis? But they are so pretty!

Anyway, this mani harkens back to mid-2017 when I briefly had oval nails. That was mostly because the sides of my nails had cracked on 3 fingers, but I kinda hated it! I know a lot of nail artists (and really just people with nails in general) who can pull off and look good with oval nails, but I don’t think I’m one of them!

The pretty trellis design was inspired by @mvargas_nails. I am glad I went with a pastel blue base, it pops nicely with both the lines and the flowers! I am also quite proud that I freehanded these lines (although tbh you can kinda tell).

I have to admit, I had no idea the rabbit hole I was getting myself into when I made these. I saw a pin that I liked on pinterest, and just decided to re-create it.

Then of course I decided to use more neon colors that the original (which may have been a mistake since, again, these were worn to see patients), and since my nails were longer I went ahead and added a flair of double lines on my nails. The doubles were only on my left hand, my right hand recently had a collision with a car door and thus has short nails.

But this is where it got nuts…I went to go find the original poster of the nail art design. And this woman has made SO MANY of these. The original mani (and the one I used as inspiration) was posted to @amvpnails over 3 years ago. Then, a few weeks later she posted a similar design with gold/pink colors. Then she seems to have noticed how popular they were and did one in blues, reds, more neons, and dark rainbows. That is a LOT of repeats! I cannot imagine repeating one design that many times, even with the color variations.

Happy Monday! No really, I mean it. Today is a good day because I start on an elective block tomorrow which means I get such things like WEEKENDS and NOT WORKING 30 HOUR CALL SHIFTS. It’s amazing. Anyway, on to nail art! In celebration of my new found freedom, this week I’m going to be posting some recent favorites that I’ve saved up, starting with this sparkly floral piece!

The base polish here is two thin coats of Holidazed Over You by OPI. This polish is a very very dark blue creme…so dark it is basically black. That said, the polish is almost a one coater! I always need more super opaque blacks (even if this IS blue), and having one in a tiny mini bottle will be useful, even if I’m just going to pretend it’s black. Oh well!

I then went and covered the polish with holographic iridescent foil from the Born Pretty Store. Most of my foil is single sheets, but this particular pattern is an entire roll! This is great because the design is fairly awesome: an array of dots with a rainbow shifting wave running through! As I tilt my nails the swirl shifts up, down, left, and right. The rainbows are incredible! I got 98% dot transfer which is really impressive. I did add a few of the missing dots using a silver metallic polish, but I think across all 5 nails I only had to add maybe 10 dots total? So win for both the foil and the foil glue!

In my continuing need to test all things related to using foil on my nails, I went hunting for a way to make foil manis last longer. The last time I used foil, I only covered it with aqua base (water-based base coat intended for some persnickety holographic polishes…and the only water-based anything that I own, unfortunately) and in the shower the whole thing started to crack and flake off! Which means it worked great for about 5 hours and then became kinda really ugly. So, this time I covered with Seche Vite after the aqua base…. and it totally worked! The aqua base seems to protect the finish and shimmer of the foil, while Seche Vite does its job and protects the mani from such hazards as water and daily life.

I kinda wish I had taken a video (not that I actually know how to get them onto the blog, but still) just so you guys could see the shifty wave pattern. It was fun! But then I decided it wasn’t enough.

I for some reason really wanted to throw on some roses over the dots! I was initially going to use layered stamping, but all the rose plates that I have contain flowers that were larger than I wanted to go with…so freehand roses it was! It’s been a while since I last freehanded flowers (yet somehow the posts I’ve put together for the next few weeks have a lot of flowers? I don’t know, I guess I lump them together thematically. Anyway), and these came out pretty good for all that I am out of practice!

That’s all for today! You can pick up the roll of shifty holographic dot foil for 99 cents at the Born Pretty Store. I am super a fan! Then all you need is some freehand roses and voila! Super fun mani, if I do say so myself. Hope you enjoyed!